46 the Party. Blair was now shadow Home Secretary, assigned the task of neutral- izing the Tories' tough position on crime. He had to defend Labour from the charge of softness without echoing the Conservatives' draconian policy. Blair honed his position into a quotable phrase: "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime." He travelled to Wash- ington again, this time to learn how the Clinton Administration had over- come the once prohibitive political ad- vantage the RepublIcans had on the crime issue. He expected to be fencing for years with the T or- ies on volatile social issues and then, at last, if John Smith should WIn, to become Home Secretary. Smith's patience seemed an as- set, an antidote to Kinnock's chip- piness. When Major's popularity began to plummet, Smith adopted the attitude of IGng Log, simply wait- ing for events to occur. An aide called it "the long game," but it was less a strategy than a reflection of Smith's temperament. Under pressure from Blair and his allies at the 1993 Party conference, Smith pushed for and won what was called "one member, one vote," or OMOV: a reduction of the per- centage of the bloc vote granted to the trade unions in determining the Party's leadership, and an increase in the con- stituency members' influence. But Smith rejected use of the phrase New Labour and any alteratIon of the Par- ty's written charter, and he banished Pe- ter lYlandelson, openly disdaining "the black art of public relations." Blair wor- ried that Smith would not press for any further reforms. By the afternoon of the day of Smith's death, May 12, 1994, Blair had decided he would run for leader, even though it meant challenging his friend Gordon Brown, whose am- bition had always been to lead the Party. The race between Blair and Brown was a phony campaign, a con- test between political brothers which didn't involve fratricide. Brown as- sembled his team, delivered one pub- lic speech, and quickly concluded he could not win. Blair, for his part, pressed forward, and thereby gained strength. So, after a dInner at a fash- ionable Islington restaurant with Blair, Brown ended his bid before ever an- nouncing it. "There was no struggle," Brown told me tersely. Brown, not ad- mitting that he was wounded, appeared statesmanlike; Blair appeared impreg- nable. Blair faced two traditionalists, Margaret Beckett and the Scotsman John Prescott, and won easily. "I would hesitate to say Tony was lucky because my friend Smith died, but in the brutal political sense he was lucky," Alexander Irvine, Blair's men- tor, says. "To be clinical about it, de- spite the fact that Gordon has a major intellect, and projects it as such, the overriding image would have been Another Worthy Scots- man. That might have forced at- tention on the predominance of Scots in the Labour Party and the extent to which Labour had become marginalized to its strongest point. That was the negative case for Gordon. The positive case for Tony is that he's fan- tastically good news at the box office." Upon his election as leader, Blair told Philip Gould, Labour's top politi- cal consultant, that he was "not going to fudge any decisions in relation to the Party," eXplaining that the concept was "to produce New Labour." Three months later, in October of 1994, in Blackpool, Blair appeared at his first Party confer- ence as leader, against a backdrop of a new banner, which read, "New Labour, New Britain." In a speech he said, "Let us say what we mean and mean what we say." Then he announced a sweep- ing and historically resonant act: La- bour's charter would be rewritten. He was proposing nothing less than strip- ping the temple of its holy of holies- expunging its Clause IV. This clause was not mere words but a religious credo, engraved on the back of mem- bership cards: "To secure for the work- ers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be pos- sible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of productIon, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular adminis- tration and control of each industry or service." Clause IV was a summons to the socialist Jerusalem. Credited to the Fabian socialist Sid- ney Webb, Clause IV had been adopted in 1918, as a right-revisionist response to the Bolshevik Revolution. But it had become a sacred text for the left. For THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 5, 1996 decades-ever since Hugh Gaitskell briefly entertained the notion of chang- ing it, in 1959-Labour leaders, in- cluding Kinnock and Smith, had veered away from the trouble that change might cause. "It was an ancient shibboleth, and people used to say, ' 0 K I ' h . ,,, BI . . ., et s not {ouc It, aIr says. "And my argument against that was if we're going to prove to people that the Labour Party is changed and is genu- inely a value-based party, not a party that still has within its constitution a quasi-lYlarxist figment of ideology, then we should have the courage to just go out and change it. If in truth we can't change it, then there is something pretty fundamentally wrong with the way we are." At the Party conference, a vote was taken on whether to affirm Clause IV. It passed by 50.9 per cent to 49.1: the largest trade unions op- posed a change. For six months, Blair stumped Party halls around the coun- try for a spring vote, and as a result he won this one resoundingly. "Now, that was a bit like breaking a spell," he says. "Few politicians are good at taking the high ground and throwing them- selves off it," observed lYlandelson, who had tried a decade earlier to deal with Clause IV by stealth-by simply ne- glecting to have it printed on the back of the membership cards. "Tony does it, and takes enormous care to bring everyone else behind him. He manages the process of risk taking with great application to detail." B LAIR has gathered around him a fairly close-knit if eclectic circle of aides and advisers, all devoted to him and the Project as one cause. His old- est friend in the group is Anji Hunter, whom he met when they were both teen-age school rebels. As his "personal political adviser," she runs the office, serves as a liaison to other lYlembers of Parliament and leaders of the Party, and speaks to Blair perhaps dozens of times a day. Jonathan Powell, the chief of staff, was drawn not from the ranks of the Party but from the Foreign Ser- vice. He was First Secretary at the Brit- ish Embassy in Washington-the link between it and the Clinton Adminis- tration. His brother, Sir Charles Pow- ell, was the foreign-policy and defense adviser to Thatcher, and was often re- ferred to as the Deputy Prime Minis-